Pressure to look ‘hot’ is taking the joy out of ageing

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Surely, one of the joys for those fortunate enough to get to old age is not having to care about how you look in a “sexy” one piece, let alone working harder than you ever did in your youth to prove you’ve still got it?

Martha Stewart in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2023 issue.Credit: Ruven Afanador/Sports Illustrated

Not if you’re famous, with some celebrities seemingly living with the sort of angsty emotional baggage and vanity brinkmanship most of us hope to leave behind with our teenage years.

Martha Stewart, 81, gracing the cover of Sports Illustrated in her bathers, attributes her youthful appearance to pilates, no carbs, fillers and the occasional Botox jab. Good for her but, seriously Martha, it sounds exhausting.

Naturally, she’s been applauded around the world for doing the shoot, during which she poses in 10 – yes T-E-N – different swimsuits, and while there is some strategic use of brunch coats, enormous sun hats, camera angles and a little artful posing, the shots show she is undeniably in good shape for an octogenarian.

Stewart says she did the shoot to empower older people – especially women. The words pain, fatigue, pills and doctors are missing from the glowing coverage, and yet with just about all the 80-year-olds I have ever known, those same words peppered almost every sentence.

Harrison Ford, 80, was told by a reporter at last week’s Cannes film festival he was “still very hot”. He’s appearing shirtless in the new Raiders Of The Lost Ark film – the fifth and final instalment of the franchise. He later joked he was “blessed” to have the body he’s had for the past eight decades.

Calista Flockhart and her husband Harrison Ford at Cannes last week.Credit: Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP

Personally, the prospect of going shirtless at 53 leaves me cold, let alone when I’m 80 and in front of millions of people. Imagine living with the expectation to be “hot” at 80 and have your life’s work defined by it. Again, exhausting.

Jane Fonda, 85, says her fashion muse is pop star Gwen Stefani, 33 years her junior.

When Fonda turned up at the Emmys in Los Angeles back in 2017, aged 80, she opted for a dress created by the same designer who dresses Lady Gaga, some 49 years her junior.

Fonda’s impressive trapezius muscles were well showcased in the gown, her long wig in a ponytail that cascaded like a cheerleader’s down her right shoulder.

Not only was the hair fake, so too were the eyelashes, and she also admitted to wearing “about a million dollars worth of Spanx” shapewear under the gown to pull off the look.

There was so much structural reinforcement and trickery going on under that dress, one suspects the entire ensemble could still stand up without spindly Fonda in it.

“I’m two years older than my dad was when he died,” she said in 2015, adding that she had collected her father’s Oscar for On Golden Pond five months before his death because he was too ill to attend the Academy Awards.

Jane Fonda and Harry Hamlin in a scene from 80 for Brady.Credit: Paramount Pictures

“Katharine Hepburn was three years younger than I am now when she made that movie. People looked older back then. I wish I were brave enough to not do plastic surgery, but I think I bought myself a decade.”

Eight years later, Fonda is still playing geriatric bombshells such as her latest character in 80 For Brady, and still looks like she could slip into a sexy one piece and pose up a storm, right alongside Martha. Perhaps they could do a calendar together?

Elle Macpherson celebrated her 59th birthday recently by donning her trademark string bikini for social media. Next year The Body will be entitled to a Senior’s Card.

Madonna, on the cusp of turning 65 and with a face as smooth as a hard-boiled egg, is about to go on an arduous world tour that would make most 30-year-olds tremble with fear. Joan Collins, 90, is taking her Behind The Shoulder Pads tour across Britain in October.

Tom Cruise, about to hit 61, will soon appear in Mission Impossible 7, in which he performed his own stunts, including shooting eight takes riding a motorbike off a cliff, free-falling to the ground, and opening his parachute just in the nick of time. We get it Tom, you are superhuman.

And hot on the heels of Rupert Murdoch, 92, returning to the singles market following his two-week engagement to former dental hygienist Ann Lesley Smith ending abruptly, Cher, 76, may soon be downloading Tinder, having reportedly broken up from her 37-year-old boyfriend, a rap artist named Alexander Edwards.

In the parallel universe of celebrity, the ageing process is clearly not like what the rest of us experience. And it’s not just celebrities trying to turn back the biological clock.

Bryan Johnson, 45, with his 17-year-old son Talmage.Credit: Magdalena Wosinska for Bloomberg Businessweek

Recently, 45-year-old American millionaire Bryan Johnson made headlines after it was revealed the anti-ageing zealot spent more than $2 million a year in a quest to turn back time – with radical daily regimens, including blood transfusions from his teenage son – to keep his internal organs “young”.

He rises each morning at 5am and swallows two dozen supplements before he exercises for one hour, tucks into a low-calorie vegan diet and brushes his teeth with a tea-tree oil and antioxidant gel rinse.

He claims to have the heart of a 37-year-old and skin of a 28-year-old. But let’s be honest, that suspicious mahogany hair tint is TOTALLY screaming midlife Wella.

I’ll stick with the grey hair, wrinkles and cosy cardigans, the rest of it sounds too exhausting for an old guy.

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